KEY POINTS:
A teenager who featured on a TV show for troubled youth after facing a string of driving offences has died in a high-speed crash.
Aaron Mark Lambert, 18, was killed when the Toyota Starlet he was driving hit a Mazda Capella just before midnight on Friday in Hamilton.
Lambert had appeared on TVNZ show Redemption Hill which followed 10 "out-of-control Kiwi teens when they are offered a taste of what could be waiting for them in the future - unless they accept help and change their ways".
The teens signed up to a "tough love" programme based at a former prison in Napier, where youth worker Steve Boxer attempted to show them the error of their ways.
Lambert's father, Mark Lambert, said his family believed Aaron had sorted his life out after appearing on the programme two years ago.
"He had a job [working as a farmhand at his grandparents' farm in Otorohanga], a nice girlfriend. He had a bit of money, and he was doing up his car."
Yesterday, he was retracing his son's night, trying to figure out what had gone wrong.
Aaron and his 19-year-old girl-friend, Erin Slee, had been out to dinner at Aaron's aunt's home, he said.
"From what I've been told, Aaron was the sober driver," he said.
Mark spoke to his son at 11pm. "He sounded sober. He sounded good."
But within an hour witnesses reported seeing Aaron's turbo-powered black Toyota Starlet Aaron speeding through Hamilton East.
"I heard that Aaron and his girl-friend had a fight. I don't think he was concentrating," said his father.
Another driver, Major Kahukura, said the Starlet overtook his car at speed and narrowly missed hitting traffic lights before hitting the Mazda Capella. Kahukura was first on the scene and called the ambulance.
Local residents helped pull the surviving occupants from the cars.
Local David Hallett sat with Aaron who was unconscious but alive and trapped in the car for about 10 minutes after the collision.
"They say that unconscious people can still hear you," he said. "So I just kept talking to him, telling him things to keep him ticking along... I just said he was going to be okay... joking that he was going to need to get some work done on his car," he said.
Hallett was still taking Aaron's neck pulse when the teenager stopped breathing, then his pulse disappeared.
"It was pretty horrible. Pretty devastating."
He said the car's female passenger was unconscious when she was taken from the car.
Hallett said it appeared the occupants of the other car were an older women and four teenagers. He said it took about 20 minutes to cut the woman driver from that car.
Redemption Hill producer Glenn Sims said the crash was an absolute tragedy.
"Aaron was a kind-hearted, intelligent, funny and generous young man with so much unfulfilled potential. To have his life cut short is a terrible tragedy," he said. "He will be very much missed by everyone who had the pleasure to know him and our thoughts are with the family."
Friends and family yesterday posted tributes on Aaron's Bebo chat site, with sister Brittaney posting a message advising that Aaron had died that morning, and saying, "We all love him and he is the world to us and it is so hard to let go and understand that he's gone."
His mother wrote, "My beautiful boy lost his life today... I love you Aaron. Fly with the angels babe!!!!"
His father said Aaron racked up several thousand dollars in fines for speeding and other driving offences. But he was a good boy, apart from being a "hoon".
Family had warned Aaron "a thousand times" that he would end his life this way if he didn't mend his ways.
"But like all teenagers he never thought it would happen to him," he said.
Four of the crash survivors were taken to Waikato hospital where three were treated for minor to moderate injuries and were expected to be discharged yesterday, a hospital spokesperson said.